The War Of The End Of The World (2 page)

“Do you know what those people up there in Canudos have done?” Epaminondas Gonçalves murmurs, banging on the desk. “They’re occupying land that doesn’t belong to them and living promiscuously, like animals.”

“Two things worthy of admiration,” the man in black asserts, nodding his head in approval. “That’s the reason why I’ve decided to spend my money on this public announcement.”

The editor sits there in silence for a moment. Before speaking again, he clears his throat. “May I ask who you are, sir?”

Without braggadocio, without arrogance, with the merest trace of solemnity, the man introduces himself in these words: “A freedom fighter, sir. Will you publish the announcement?”

“Impossible, sir,” Epaminondas Gonçalves, master of the situation now, replies. “The authorities in Bahia are merely waiting for an excuse to close down my paper. Though they’ve paid lip service to the Republic, they’re still monarchists. I take it you’ve realized that we’re the only true republican daily in this entire state.”

The man in black gestures disdainfully and mutters between his teeth: “So I thought.”

“I advise you not to take this announcement to the
Diário da Bahia
,” the editor adds, handing him back the piece of paper. “It belongs to the Baron de Canabrava, the rightful owner of Canudos. You’ll end up in jail.”

Without one word of farewell, the man in black turns round and leaves the office, pocketing the announcement. He crosses the outer office of the paper without looking at anyone, without so much as a nod as he takes his leave, his footfalls resounding, merely casting a glance out of the corner of his eye—a funereal silhouette, fiery-red wavy hair—at the journalists and the customers placing paid advertisements. The young journalist with the thick eyeglasses of someone who is very nearsighted gets up from his desk after he has walked past, and with a sheet of yellow paper in his hand walks over to the office of the editor-in-chief, where Epaminondas Gonçalves is sitting, still watching the stranger’s every move as he departs.

“By order of the Governor of the State of Bahia, His Excellency Senhor Luiz Viana, a company of the Ninth Infantry Battalion, under the command of Lieutenant Pires Ferreira, left Salvador today, charged with the mission of wresting control of Canudos from the bandits who have occupied the estate and of capturing their leader, the Sebastianist Antônio Conselheiro,” he reads aloud as he stands in the doorway. “Page one or inside, sir?”

“Have it set out below the announcements of funerals and Masses,” the editor-in-chief says. He points toward the street, down which the man dressed in black has disappeared. “Do you know who that fellow is?”

“Galileo Gall,” the nearsighted journalist answers. “A Scotsman who’s been going around asking people in Bahia if he could feel their heads.”

He was born in Pombal, the son of a shoemaker and his mistress, the latter a cripple who, despite her handicap, had brought three boys into the world before him and gave birth after him to a little girl who survived the drought. They named him Antônio, and if there had been such a thing as logic in this world, he should never have gone on living, for when he was still a baby crawling on all fours the catastrophe occurred that devastated the region, killing crops, men, and animals. Because of the drought, almost everyone in Pombal emigrated to the coast, but Tibúrcio da Mota, who in his half century of life had never journeyed more than a league away from that village in which there was not one pair of feet that did not wear shoes made by his hands, announced that he would not leave his house. And he remained faithful to his resolve, staying there in Pombal with no more than a couple dozen other people at most, for even the Lazarist Fathers’ mission cleared out entirely.

When, a year later, the émigrés from Pombal began to return, encouraged by the news that the low-lying ground had been flooded once more and cereal crops could again be planted, Tibúrcio da Mota was dead and buried, along with his crippled concubine and their three oldest children. They had eaten everything that was edible, and when all that was gone, everything that was green, and at the end, everything that teeth could chew. The parish priest, Dom Casimiro, who buried them one after the other, asserted that they had not died of hunger but of stupidity, by eating the leather in the cobbler’s shop and drinking the waters of the Lagoa do Boi, a breeding ground for mosquitoes and pestilence that even young goats shunned. Dom Casimiro took Antônio and his little sister in, kept them alive on a diet of air and prayers, and, when the houses of the village were full of people once again, sought a home for them.

The little girl was taken in by her godmother, who brought her along with her when she went to work at one of the estates belonging to the Baron de Canabrava. Antônio, then five years old, was adopted by the other shoemaker in Pombal, known as One-Eye—he had lost the other in a street fight—who had learned his trade in Tibúrcio da Mota’s cobbler shop and on returning to Pombal had inherited his clientele. He was a bad-tempered man who often drank too much, so that dawn found him lying in a stupor in the street, reeking of raw sugarcane brandy. He did not have a wife, and made Antônio work like a beast of burden, sweeping, cleaning, handing him nails, shears, saddles, boots, and bringing him hides from the tannery. He made him sleep on animal skins, next to the worktable where One-Eye spent all his time when he was not drinking with his pals.

The orphan was emaciated, docile, mere skin and bones, with shy eyes that aroused the compassion of the women of Pombal, who, whenever they could, gave him something to eat or the clothes that their sons had outgrown. One day a group of them—half a dozen women who had known his crippled mother and had stood at her side gossiping at innumerable baptisms, confirmations, wakes, weddings—went to One-Eye’s cobbler shop to force him to send Antônio to catechism classes so as to ready him for his First Communion. They threw such a scare into him by telling him that God would hold him responsible if the boy died without having made it that the shoemaker grudgingly agreed to allow him to attend the lessons at the mission, every afternoon, before vespers.

Something out of the ordinary occurred then in the boy’s life; shortly thereafter, as a result of the changes that took place in him because of the sermons of the Lazarists, people began to call him the Little Blessed One. He would come out of the sessions where they preached with his eyes no longer fixed on his surroundings and as though purified of dross. One-Eye spread the word about that he often found him kneeling in the darkness at night, weeping for Christ’s sufferings, so caught up in them that he was able to bring him back to this world only by cradling him in his arms and rocking him. On other nights he heard him talking in his sleep, in agitation, of Judas’s betrayal, of Mary Magdalene’s repentance, of the crown of thorns, and one night he heard him make a vow of perpetual chastity, like St. Francis de Sales at the age of eight.

Antônio had found a vocation to which to devote his entire life. He continued to fulfill, most obediently, all the orders given him by One-Eye, but he did so with his eyes half closed and moving his lips in such a way that everyone knew that, even though he was sweeping or hurrying about the shoemaker’s shop or holding the shoe sole that One-Eye was nailing, he was really praying. The boy’s conduct disturbed and terrified his foster father. In the corner where he slept, the Little Blessed One gradually built an altar, with printed images they gave him at the mission and a cross of
xiquexique
wood that he himself carved and painted. He would light a candle before it to pray on arising in the morning and on going to bed at night, and all his free time was spent before it, on his knees, with his hands joined and a contrite expression, rather than hanging around the ranches, riding unbroken horses bareback, hunting doves, or going to see bulls castrated, the way the other youngsters of Pombal did.

After making his First Communion, he was an altar boy for Dom Casimiro, and when the latter died he continued to serve Mass for the Lazarist Fathers of the mission, even though in order to do so he was obliged to walk a league a day to get there and back. He swung the censer in processions and helped decorate the portable platforms and the altars on the street corners where the Virgin and the Blessed Jesus halted to rest. His religious devotion was as great as his goodness. It was a familiar sight to the inhabitants of Pombal to see him serving as a guide for blind Adolfo, whom he sometimes took out to the pasture grounds for Colonel Ferreira’s colts, where he had worked till he got cataracts and which he now sorely missed every day of his life. The Little Blessed One would take him by the arm and lead him across the fields, with a stick in his hand to poke about in the dirt on the lookout for snakes, patiently listening to his stories. And Antônio also collected food and clothing for Simeão the leper, who had been living like a wild animal ever since the villagers had forbidden him to come anywhere near Pombal. Once a week the Little Blessed One took him a bundleful of bits of bread and jerky and different sorts of grain that he had begged for him, and the villagers would spy him in the distance, guiding the old man with long locks and bare feet and covered with nothing but a yellow animal pelt as he made his way along amid the rocky stretches on the hill where his cave was.

The first time he saw the Counselor, the Little Blessed One was fourteen years old and had had a terrible disappointment just a few weeks before. Father Moraes of the Lazarist mission had thrown cold water on his fondest dreams by informing him that he couldn’t be a priest because he had been born out of wedlock. He consoled him by explaining to him that a person could still serve God even without receiving Holy Orders, and promised him to take whatever steps he could on his behalf at a Capuchin monastery that might be willing to take him in as a lay brother. The Little Blessed One wept that night with such heartfelt sobs that One-Eye flew into a rage and for the first time in many years beat him badly. Twenty days later, beneath the glaring midday sun, there appeared on the main street of Pombal a lanky, dark-skinned figure, with black hair and gleaming eyes, enveloped in a dark purple tunic; followed by half a dozen people who looked like beggars and yet had happy faces, he strode through the town and headed straight for the old adobe chapel with curved roof tiles which had fallen into such a sorry state of disrepair following Dom Casimiro’s death that birds had made their nests amid the statues. The Little Blessed One, like many of the villagers, saw the pilgrim stretch out face down on the ground to pray, and his followers do likewise, and that afternoon he heard him give counsel as to the salvation of the soul, condemn the ungodly, and predict the future.

That night the Little Blessed One did not sleep in the shoemaker’s shop but in the public square of Pombal, along with the pilgrims, who had lain on the bare ground around the saint. And the following morning and afternoon, and every day that the saint remained in Pombal, the Little Blessed One worked alongside him and his followers, repairing the legs and backs of the broken-down benches in the chapel, leveling its floor, and erecting a stone wall to enclose the cemetery, which up until then had been a tongue of land creeping out into the town itself. And every night he squatted on his heels before him, listening in rapt absorption to the truths that fell from his lips.

But when, on the Counselor’s next-to-last night in Pombal, Antônio the Little Blessed One asked his permission to accompany him wherever his pilgrimage might take him, the saint’s eyes first of all—at once intense and icy—and then his mouth said no. Kneeling before the Counselor, the Little Blessed One wept bitterly. It was very late at night, Pombal was fast asleep, as were the pilgrims in rags and tatters, all huddled up next to each other. The bonfires had gone out but the stars were gleaming brightly overhead and the chirring of cicadas could be heard. The Counselor let him weep, allowed him to kiss the hem of his tunic, and did not change expression when the Little Blessed One begged him again to let him follow him, since his heart told him that by doing so he would be serving the Good Lord Jesus better. The youngster clung to the Counselor’s ankles and kissed his callused feet again and again. When he saw that the boy was exhausted, the Counselor took his head in his two hands and forced him to look at him. Bringing his face down close to his, he asked him in a solemn voice if he loved God so much that he would suffer pain so as to offer it to Him in sacrifice. The Little Blessed One nodded yes, several times. The Counselor raised his tunic, and the boy could see, in the first faint light of dawn, that he was removing from around his waist a wire that was lacerating his flesh. “You wear it now,” he heard him say. The Counselor himself helped the Little Blessed One unfasten his clothes, cinch the wire tightly around his waist, and knot it.

When, seven months later, the Counselor and his followers—a few of the faces had changed, their numbers had grown, among them there was now an enormous, half-naked black, but their poverty and the happiness in their eyes were those of the pilgrims of the past—appeared again in Pombal, enveloped in a cloud of dust, the wire was still around the Little Blessed One’s waist, the flesh of which had turned black and blue and then been sawed raw and later on became covered with dark crusts. He had not taken it off even for one day, and since it would gradually become looser and looser just from the movement of his body, every so often he would cinch it up very tightly again. Father Moraes had tried to dissuade him from continuing to wear it, explaining to him that a certain amount of voluntarily endured pain was pleasing in God’s sight, but that, past a certain limit, that particular sacrifice could become a morbid pleasure encouraged by the Devil and that he was in danger of going beyond that limit at any moment now.